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Sep. 19th, 2019 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Giving up Refined Sugar Changed My Brain
Sigh. I keep trying. As the writer attests -- it is harder than it looks, because refined sugar is added to basically EVERYTHING, including drugs. But I am trying.
2. Nobody else may care about this...but I wondered Why Donna Tart's A Secret History Never Became a Movie
Apparently it's the age old case of the wrong people snapping up the rights, not knowing what if anything to do with them, and the rights inevitably reverting back to the writer.
Shame. I'd go see "A Secret History", "The Goldfinch" doesn't interest me in the least.
Although to be honest, I'm not positive "A Secret History" would work that well on the screen, it's an internal book.
3. Falling Out of the Middle Class into Poverty
Social classes are relative and definitions vary, but if money defines class, the sociologists would say I was not among the wretched of the earth but probably at the higher end of the lower classes. I’m not working class because I don’t have what most people consider a job. I’m a writer, although I don’t grind out the words the way I once did. Which is one reason I’m poor.
My income consists of a Social Security check and a miserable pension from the Washington Post, where I worked intermittently for a total of about twenty-five years, interrupted by a stint at a publishing house in New York just before my profit-sharing would have taken effect. I returned to the Post, won a Pulitzer Prize, continued working for another eight years, with a leave of absence now and then. As the last leave rolled on, the Post suggested I come back to work or, alternatively, the company would allow me to take an early retirement. I was fifty-three at the time. I chose retirement because I was under the illusion—perhaps delusion is the more accurate word—that I could make a living as a writer and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap.
The pension would start twelve years later when I was sixty-five. What cost a dollar at the time I accepted the offer, would cost $1.44 when the checks began. Today, what cost a dollar in 1986 costs $2.10. The cumulative rate of inflation is 109.7 percent. The pension remains the same. It is not adjusted for inflation. In the meantime, medical insurance costs have soared. Today, I pay more than twice as much for a month of medical insurance as I paid in 1987 for a year of better coverage. My pension is worth half what it was. And I’m one of the lucky ones.
I was never remotely rich by what counts for rich today. (That requires a lot of zeroes after the first two or three digits.) But I look through my checkbooks from twenty-five and thirty years ago and I think, Wow! What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid. As my older brother, who to keep me off the streets invited me to live with him after his wife died, said, shaking his head in warning, “Don’t spend your capital.” His advice was right, but his timing was wrong. I’d already spent it. He sounded like the ghost of my father. Capital produces income. If you want to have an income, don’t dip into your capital. I’d always been a bit of a contrarian, even as a child.
Sounds like quite a few of my relatives, actually. Who are living on limited income for some of the same reasons. I fear ending up in similar straights, so am trying to save money. My father was raised in a family that had gone from white collar to working poor, so drilled the importance of saving and the fear of being poor in my brother and I. We both live beneath our means in different ways.
4. How to Survive a Lightening Strike -- This certainly sounds useful, although isn't the best way to survive one -- not to be anywhere near it?
The best advice for people who find themselves outside during a lightning storm is simply to get inside, either a home or a vehicle. Yet even buildings aren’t completely impervious to lightning strikes. You’ll want to stay off the telephone, out of the shower, and away from sinks. Lightning can pass through landlines, plumbing—metal pipes and faucets—and all manner of electrical wiring. Last February, it ruptured gas pipes in the crawl space of a house in Steuben County, Indiana. A kitchen appliance then ignited the vented gas, causing a massive explosion. The only family member home at the time was the dog, Boomer. A neighbor rescued him from the rubble after he was sent flying from the house in his crate.
One common type of lightning encounter, responsible for 20 to 30 percent of injuries, is a side flash or splash, when lightning leaps from one grounded object to another—from a building to a person, from a tree to a horse, or even from a person to another. In nearly all these incidents, too little electricity enters the body to be lethal. A direct strike almost always delivers more current inside a person, making it much more deadly. A strike like the one Utley suffered probably should have killed him, too. Had his friends not performed CPR so quickly, he wouldn’t be alive today.
For Utley, getting adequate treatment after he recovered was a struggle. He was eventually fortunate enough to find a few doctors who helped him cope with the long-term symptoms, but along the way he met many medical experts who understood little or nothing about the kind of injuries he sustained.
5. The Enduring Mystery of JAWN, Philadelphia's all purpose noun.
If your first thought was much like mine..."wait, since when was JAWN a word?" This article is for you.
As with its architecture, Philadelphia’s accent, syntax, and vocabulary are rarely discussed outside of the city. Words, phrases, and structures have just about the same geographical span as a peanut chew or a Tastykake. Linguists have long been fascinated by the peculiar mid-Atlantic mutations of words such as “water” and “creek” (in Philadelphia parlance, “wooder” and “crick”) and an unusual lexicon that includes words such as “hoagie” and “jimmies” (a sub sandwich and sprinkles, respectively), but nothing has captivated them quite like “jawn.”
The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”
It is a word without boundaries or limits. Growing up in the suburbs just west of the city, I heard it used mostly to refer to objects and events. In the 2015 movie Creed, a character asks a sandwich maker to “put some onions on that jawn.” But it can get much more complex. It can refer to abstract nouns such as theories; a colleague of Jones routinely refers to “Marxist jawn.” It can also refer to people or groups of people. “Side-jawn,” meaning a someone with whom the speaker cheats on his or her significant other, “is a uniquely Philly thing as far as I can tell,” says Jones. “And not something you want to be.”
“Jawn” can be singular: “pass me that jawn.” It can be plural, and in a couple of different ways. “Jawns” is fine, but you can also modify “jawn” elsewhere. “You can say ‘jawns,’ but more often it’s going to be, like, ‘Where’d you get them jawn,’” says Jones. It can be negative or positive or neutral depending on context.
It is a magical word, and did not come about in a vacuum. The rise of “jawn” dovetails with breakthroughs in the study of American linguistics itself. What we know about our ever-evolving speech patterns can, in part, be seen through this one weird word.
6. As if the discussion regarding the word "Jawn" isn't enough proof that... English is Not Normal...
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.
We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.
More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s – why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.
Honestly, you just have to get into a semantics fight with a bunch of Brits and Americans and Australians and Canadians online to figure this one out. Although I can't help but wonder if people from Spain have similar disagreements over Spanish in other Spanish speaking countries? I know there are about fifteen different versions of Chinese -- I used to in a finance department in which 90% of the people were Chinese and came from various areas within China, none of them spoke the same dialect. We'd have lengthy discussions or debates over which brand of Chinese made the most sense, was the most clear, and easiest to learn. I'm thinking they preferred Mandarin to Cantonese...and the other varieties.
I've had a lot of interesting conversations regarding language over the years. Possibly because it has become exceedingly clear to me that I live in the tower of babble.
7. Wales' mom died last night. Around 9:50 pm. Second friend who lost their mother within the space of two months. This is very disturbing. Although both their mothers are older than mine. I'd met Wales' Mother. She was a kind, generous, and smart soul, whose mind was pretty much gone by the time she died -- also she was bed-ridden and in pain. So this was for the best, even though it is very painful.
It hit me after I got off the phone, that somewhere along the line I'd found a way to forgive Wales for what happened in 2009. I let go of the anger. (In 2009, my grandmother died and Wales wasn't there for me. But enough other people were, so it didn't matter in the long run. And I could let go of it, eventually.) In order to forgive, I think, we have to let go of anger, and our own self-interest. I can't decide which is harder? Anyhow, I was able to be there for her -- if only over the phone tonight, and possibly this weekend.
I feel sad for Wales. Neither of her brothers are speaking to her at the moment, although her sister did start speaking to her again, as has her father. I honestly don't get that. But then, I have more than a little of my own mother in me -- my mother doesn't like people to go to bed angry. As a child, if I was pissed off at her, she would come to my bedroom and work it with me, so that I didn't fall asleep upset or angry with her. And even now -- if we have a fight on the phone, she'll call back and work it out. My mother the eternal peace maker. She doesn't believe in burning bridges or not talking to family members.
In a way she has a point, cutting people off can at times feel like chopping off an imaginary limb.
Sigh. I keep trying. As the writer attests -- it is harder than it looks, because refined sugar is added to basically EVERYTHING, including drugs. But I am trying.
2. Nobody else may care about this...but I wondered Why Donna Tart's A Secret History Never Became a Movie
Apparently it's the age old case of the wrong people snapping up the rights, not knowing what if anything to do with them, and the rights inevitably reverting back to the writer.
Shame. I'd go see "A Secret History", "The Goldfinch" doesn't interest me in the least.
Although to be honest, I'm not positive "A Secret History" would work that well on the screen, it's an internal book.
3. Falling Out of the Middle Class into Poverty
Social classes are relative and definitions vary, but if money defines class, the sociologists would say I was not among the wretched of the earth but probably at the higher end of the lower classes. I’m not working class because I don’t have what most people consider a job. I’m a writer, although I don’t grind out the words the way I once did. Which is one reason I’m poor.
My income consists of a Social Security check and a miserable pension from the Washington Post, where I worked intermittently for a total of about twenty-five years, interrupted by a stint at a publishing house in New York just before my profit-sharing would have taken effect. I returned to the Post, won a Pulitzer Prize, continued working for another eight years, with a leave of absence now and then. As the last leave rolled on, the Post suggested I come back to work or, alternatively, the company would allow me to take an early retirement. I was fifty-three at the time. I chose retirement because I was under the illusion—perhaps delusion is the more accurate word—that I could make a living as a writer and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap.
The pension would start twelve years later when I was sixty-five. What cost a dollar at the time I accepted the offer, would cost $1.44 when the checks began. Today, what cost a dollar in 1986 costs $2.10. The cumulative rate of inflation is 109.7 percent. The pension remains the same. It is not adjusted for inflation. In the meantime, medical insurance costs have soared. Today, I pay more than twice as much for a month of medical insurance as I paid in 1987 for a year of better coverage. My pension is worth half what it was. And I’m one of the lucky ones.
I was never remotely rich by what counts for rich today. (That requires a lot of zeroes after the first two or three digits.) But I look through my checkbooks from twenty-five and thirty years ago and I think, Wow! What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid. As my older brother, who to keep me off the streets invited me to live with him after his wife died, said, shaking his head in warning, “Don’t spend your capital.” His advice was right, but his timing was wrong. I’d already spent it. He sounded like the ghost of my father. Capital produces income. If you want to have an income, don’t dip into your capital. I’d always been a bit of a contrarian, even as a child.
Sounds like quite a few of my relatives, actually. Who are living on limited income for some of the same reasons. I fear ending up in similar straights, so am trying to save money. My father was raised in a family that had gone from white collar to working poor, so drilled the importance of saving and the fear of being poor in my brother and I. We both live beneath our means in different ways.
4. How to Survive a Lightening Strike -- This certainly sounds useful, although isn't the best way to survive one -- not to be anywhere near it?
The best advice for people who find themselves outside during a lightning storm is simply to get inside, either a home or a vehicle. Yet even buildings aren’t completely impervious to lightning strikes. You’ll want to stay off the telephone, out of the shower, and away from sinks. Lightning can pass through landlines, plumbing—metal pipes and faucets—and all manner of electrical wiring. Last February, it ruptured gas pipes in the crawl space of a house in Steuben County, Indiana. A kitchen appliance then ignited the vented gas, causing a massive explosion. The only family member home at the time was the dog, Boomer. A neighbor rescued him from the rubble after he was sent flying from the house in his crate.
One common type of lightning encounter, responsible for 20 to 30 percent of injuries, is a side flash or splash, when lightning leaps from one grounded object to another—from a building to a person, from a tree to a horse, or even from a person to another. In nearly all these incidents, too little electricity enters the body to be lethal. A direct strike almost always delivers more current inside a person, making it much more deadly. A strike like the one Utley suffered probably should have killed him, too. Had his friends not performed CPR so quickly, he wouldn’t be alive today.
For Utley, getting adequate treatment after he recovered was a struggle. He was eventually fortunate enough to find a few doctors who helped him cope with the long-term symptoms, but along the way he met many medical experts who understood little or nothing about the kind of injuries he sustained.
5. The Enduring Mystery of JAWN, Philadelphia's all purpose noun.
If your first thought was much like mine..."wait, since when was JAWN a word?" This article is for you.
As with its architecture, Philadelphia’s accent, syntax, and vocabulary are rarely discussed outside of the city. Words, phrases, and structures have just about the same geographical span as a peanut chew or a Tastykake. Linguists have long been fascinated by the peculiar mid-Atlantic mutations of words such as “water” and “creek” (in Philadelphia parlance, “wooder” and “crick”) and an unusual lexicon that includes words such as “hoagie” and “jimmies” (a sub sandwich and sprinkles, respectively), but nothing has captivated them quite like “jawn.”
The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”
It is a word without boundaries or limits. Growing up in the suburbs just west of the city, I heard it used mostly to refer to objects and events. In the 2015 movie Creed, a character asks a sandwich maker to “put some onions on that jawn.” But it can get much more complex. It can refer to abstract nouns such as theories; a colleague of Jones routinely refers to “Marxist jawn.” It can also refer to people or groups of people. “Side-jawn,” meaning a someone with whom the speaker cheats on his or her significant other, “is a uniquely Philly thing as far as I can tell,” says Jones. “And not something you want to be.”
“Jawn” can be singular: “pass me that jawn.” It can be plural, and in a couple of different ways. “Jawns” is fine, but you can also modify “jawn” elsewhere. “You can say ‘jawns,’ but more often it’s going to be, like, ‘Where’d you get them jawn,’” says Jones. It can be negative or positive or neutral depending on context.
It is a magical word, and did not come about in a vacuum. The rise of “jawn” dovetails with breakthroughs in the study of American linguistics itself. What we know about our ever-evolving speech patterns can, in part, be seen through this one weird word.
6. As if the discussion regarding the word "Jawn" isn't enough proof that... English is Not Normal...
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.
We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.
More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s – why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.
Honestly, you just have to get into a semantics fight with a bunch of Brits and Americans and Australians and Canadians online to figure this one out. Although I can't help but wonder if people from Spain have similar disagreements over Spanish in other Spanish speaking countries? I know there are about fifteen different versions of Chinese -- I used to in a finance department in which 90% of the people were Chinese and came from various areas within China, none of them spoke the same dialect. We'd have lengthy discussions or debates over which brand of Chinese made the most sense, was the most clear, and easiest to learn. I'm thinking they preferred Mandarin to Cantonese...and the other varieties.
I've had a lot of interesting conversations regarding language over the years. Possibly because it has become exceedingly clear to me that I live in the tower of babble.
7. Wales' mom died last night. Around 9:50 pm. Second friend who lost their mother within the space of two months. This is very disturbing. Although both their mothers are older than mine. I'd met Wales' Mother. She was a kind, generous, and smart soul, whose mind was pretty much gone by the time she died -- also she was bed-ridden and in pain. So this was for the best, even though it is very painful.
It hit me after I got off the phone, that somewhere along the line I'd found a way to forgive Wales for what happened in 2009. I let go of the anger. (In 2009, my grandmother died and Wales wasn't there for me. But enough other people were, so it didn't matter in the long run. And I could let go of it, eventually.) In order to forgive, I think, we have to let go of anger, and our own self-interest. I can't decide which is harder? Anyhow, I was able to be there for her -- if only over the phone tonight, and possibly this weekend.
I feel sad for Wales. Neither of her brothers are speaking to her at the moment, although her sister did start speaking to her again, as has her father. I honestly don't get that. But then, I have more than a little of my own mother in me -- my mother doesn't like people to go to bed angry. As a child, if I was pissed off at her, she would come to my bedroom and work it with me, so that I didn't fall asleep upset or angry with her. And even now -- if we have a fight on the phone, she'll call back and work it out. My mother the eternal peace maker. She doesn't believe in burning bridges or not talking to family members.
In a way she has a point, cutting people off can at times feel like chopping off an imaginary limb.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-20 11:34 am (UTC)I'm sorry to hear about Wales' mother.
I love English. It's SO weird and wonderful.
As for retirement, it scares the hell out of me, and everyone I know.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-20 12:23 pm (UTC)Thank you. And agreed. I'm very glad I learned English as a child, I have serious doubts I'd have figured it out as an adult.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-20 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-20 11:02 pm (UTC)There was a dog being kept alone at home during the day locked in a crate?
The sugar article was a good read. Someone I'm following on Pillowfort did the same to treat a health problem she has and within a week was reporting similar issues in terms of the changing taste of food, significantly fewer health symptoms and feeling better overall. I'd be interested in seeing a study on a large scale because I suspect it could be the key to a dramatic change for a lot of people.
I recall reading about a family who did the same as a permanent lifestyle and they had one day a week where they'd have something with refined sugar. It was a way of making allowances for the fact that it's very hard to avoid completely and it's easier to stay away if you know you can have something if you really want it. The plus was that they often found they went longer than a week without it because the sugared products no longer tasted as good.
I think the trick is probably doing a short term complete absence as the writer did and then shooting for 80-90% abstinence long-term. If you try to keep it to 100% I think it'll just always feel like a failure.
Before I even read the Falling article I was reminded of two different people I'd followed on LJ. Both made some drastically bad choices about leaving well-paying jobs with benefits for emotional reasons and both just disappeared. I had to wonder if no one they knew told them what a really risky thing they were doing or not.
I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid.
This is sadly true for a lot of people. However what I think is missing from this view is how poorly most people are educated about finances starting from when they're young -- which is generally the opposite of what the wealthy do. You can't force someone to make safer choices but if you're able to give them a habit of thinking carefully about their money and avoid thinking too rosily about the future, chances are they will either listen later or they'll make better decisions on their own.
Of course the most useful thing this guy could do is move to a low-cost state. It is almost astonishing how much less one would pay for everything in other places since he's in one of the costliest places in the country.
He makes such a great point about the non-reduction of paperwork. I can see the reductions myself but especially when dealing with the poor, less stuff is available electronically or can be provided that way. It's why libraries' computers are so heavily used.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-21 12:47 am (UTC)I did the no-sugar thing for about two years.
And...
I think the trick is probably doing a short term complete absence as the writer did and then shooting for 80-90% abstinence long-term. If you try to keep it to 100% I think it'll just always feel like a failure.
Well, yes and no.
No -- don't do cold turkey, it doesn't work. You rebound hard. I did.
Also, it's not just a physical addiction or craving. That's where they all get it wrong. Eating is a mental, emotional, and physical thing. And everyone deals with it differently. Also everyone's body is different.
I was fine, up until around 2016...when things went south, due to work, family, personal, and national/global stress. Basically, I looked around me and decided it was too frigging hard, and I'd just be gluten free and let myself eat most of the other stuff. And I paid for it.
So, now, I'm slowly going back on the restrictive diet from hell (but I have a better doctor --get a really good primary care if you do this), and being a little less restrictive. But I also have a far more restrictive diet than he's talking about.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-21 01:28 am (UTC)So true. I have a friend who made the idiotic decision to transfer all her money from stocks to bonds when the market crashed in 2008, against the advice of a financial analyst, and myself. (My father is very good at investing money and working with brokerage firms and financial advisors. My parents took my to theirs a few years back and he advised me not to leave my current job unless I could find something similar financially, along with consolidating some funds and leaving others alone. He didn't have to tell me twice. I had a rocky and highly stressful employment history, and now was working for a public agency and represented by a union. Not only that, my social security is now Railroad Retirement Benefit, which has a higher income level and is more stable. Plus an excellent pension. He's right, I'd have to be nuts to leave.)
Of course the most useful thing this guy could do is move to a low-cost state. It is almost astonishing how much less one would pay for everything in other places since he's in one of the costliest places in the country.
On a sad note? The writer has since passed away. I read the blurb at the bottom finally. He died in 2017. Also, I'm not sure he could -- his family was clearly in DC. (He wasn't living in NYC, I think he was living in DC?) And big cities often have more subsidized and affordable housing. While NYC and DC are extremely costly cities to live in -- they also, ironically, have far more benefits and services for the working poor, and people below the poverty level as opposed to the smaller cheaper cities. If you are poor -- you do NOT want to live in Kansas City or Indianapolis, even though both are cheaper -- neither have the level of services or activities. They are conservative states that don't provide these avenues. NY has Healthy NY that provides extensive benefits for those who can't afford it. Also they have a lot of subsidized housing that is run by the state not the federal government. Not to mention public hospitals and walk in medical clinics. Add to that food shelters, and soup kitchens.
It's actually easier to be homeless in a huge urban area -- you can sleep over subway grates, in the subway stations, in your car or bus, squat in an abandoned building...
I worked with Legal Aid of Western Missouri for a bit, and have seen what is available in NYC. If I was dead broke -- I'd want to live in NYC city. I can beg for money, and there's more opportunities to make a quick buck. Plus, there's more libraries to use.
And, you can usually hitch a ride on transit, a bus or a train without paying or get someone to spot you a ride. Plus free newspapers. And free food -- they have a lot of give-aways and food drives. And, you can rob recycling garbage cans for cans/bottles and return them to stores for a quick buck.
Add to all this? In NYC, you don't have to buy or own a car. I save over $5,000 a year because of that alone.